Road Trip to Grapevine, Texas

Oh, what a lot of fun this one was!
We left here about noon on Friday. Because y’all know we’re not doing The Early Thang. Nope. Not any more. For the first year I went back to school and drove every week to Lubbock, I left the house at 5:00 a.m. Yes:  five o’clock in the morning. Every Monday. Meaning I’d get up at some ungodly hour and be on the road in time to make a 7:30 class. Then for years after that, I got up every morning at 5:30. For years. So:  no. I get up about 7, but I’m not leaving the house for until a Decent Hour.
We stop at Starbucks and fill up our thermoses. Thermi?  It’s one of those comforting little rituals that signal “Road Trip! Woo-hoo!”
Now, theoretically, I’m supposed to be stitching the entire time The EGE is driving. I can get a TON of stitching done on the road. But, see, we’ve got this new Texas Travel Guide, and it’s amazing. We thought we Knew Texas, but, honeys, turns out we don’t know shit. We didn’t know about Turkey, remember? Or Bob Wills Day, or the Hometown of Waylon Jennings, or, oh, just tons of stuff. Tons.
There are all these little towns we’ve never heard of, let alone actually been to. So every time we get out on the road, I’m going through the book, checking out what’s along the route, going, “Hey! You ever been to Dumas?”
The Ever-Gorgeous Earl is not A Typical Driver Guy. You know, a Driver like our dads. Thank you, jesus. I grew up riding across the country in the back seat while my dad drove—I don’t think my mother ever drove—and he drove With a Purpose:  to get where we were going as quickly and safely as possible. This meant he didn’t speed, and it meant he also didn’t stop. You know guys:  they have bladders the size of the Goodyear Blimp, so they never, ever need to stop. If they had a big enough gas tank, they could drive from Chicago to LA without stopping once. Women? Hell, we need to pee as soon as we pull out of the driveway. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask my husband. We leave the house, drive to Starbucks? I have to go pee. Thank goodness Starbucks has Good Restrooms.
Generally. Not always.
The first time I went on a road trip with The EGE, before he was The EGE, I expected the worst. Irritability, grouchiness, silent concentration. He was amazingly cheerful and talkative, but when we had a flat tire on the highway right next to a very dead cat, I thought, “Uh-oh. The jig is up now.” I’m standing on the other side of the car, pretending the cat isn’t there and trying to be invisible, and I hear this funny noise. I peek around the fender, and there’s my boyfriend, changing a tire, singing to himself, happy as could be.
He loves to travel. He loves road trips. There’s hardly anything that can happen that irritates him. Plus he never minds stopping. For anything:  peeing, getting water, having a picnic, taking pictures. Seeing The Home of the World Famous Two-Headed Rattlesnake. We could be sailing down the interstate, and I could go, “Hey, that was The Home of the World Famous Two-Headed Rattlesnake,” and he’d go, “Want me to turn around?”
So he’s driving, and I’m checking out Famous Stuff in Abilene, Cisco, Ranger, Eastland.
And I go, “Hey! Eastland is the Home of Old Rip! How come you never told me about that?”
See, he went to Jr.. college in Cisco, which is like right next door to Eastland. He had a good friend who lived in Eastland, so they went there a lot. And if he went to Eastland a lot, surely he had to have known all about Old Rip. Right? I mean, this horny toad toured the US! He went to the White House and met Coolidge! Surely The EGE knew all about Old Rip.
No. Unbelievably, he had never even heard of Old Rip. Nor had I, but at least I had an excuse:  I had never been to Eastland.
So of course we had to go. First, of course, we stopped at the Russell Stover Outlet in Abilene, where we walk in the door, every time, and the women say, “Hey! Where’ve y’all been?”


They wonder, I’m sure, how people who buy such an incredible amount of chocolate whenever we’re there can possibly not be there all the time, loading up on tons and tons and tons of chocolate.We’re just glad it’s not any closer to home. We’d be the size of the Goodyear Blimp.
Then, The EGE armed with his Road-
Trip Ice Cream Cone, it’s on to Eastland.
It is a surprising little town:  lots of trees, big, old, well-tended houses, remarkably friendly people, some of whom were intent on trying to get us to drive back to Midland, sell our house, pack up everything we own, and move to Eastland to spend our sunset years. Apparently they’re trying to increase their pool of tax-paying citizens as quickly as possible.
We walked around the courthouse:

We admired the brick streets:

We found Old Rip in his velvet-lined, glass-topped casket:


We read the sign:

(I bitched a lot about any town that would have, as its claim to fame, the fact that they walled a horny toad (Texas Horned Lizard,  phrynosoma cornutum) ALIVE, inside a building. Do I believe the story? Honeys, I’m not an atheist to be contrary; I’m an atheist because I’m a skeptic, i.e., I don’t believe much of anything. I do believe that, if you live in a tiny little town and desperately need some kind of Claim to Fame, a 31-+-year-old Rip Van Winkle horny toad just might be your ticket.)


So the sign said to find out more about Old Rip at the Chamber of Commerce, only it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. We asked a young guy who got out of his pick-up and walked up to the courthouse, and he wasn’t sure. But he walked us all around, trying to see which building it might have moved to. He and The EGE talked football championships. Then he called out to another guy getting into a pick-up, “Hey, Judge W, do you know where the Chamber of Commerce moved to?” and the judge, in cowboy boots and jeans and snap-front shirt, pointed helpfully off down the block to the old Connollee Hotel, which at one time must have been fabulous. Now most of it is closed.


So we picked up some more info about Old Rip, and The EGE asked about his friend, Bob Mace. And one of the Chamber of Commerce women said, “Bob’s my brother-in-law,” and picked up her phone and tried to call him. No answer, but still.  This is what it’s like:  you go places, you talk to people, you find people who know people you know, people you used to know, people related to people you used to know. The world is a very small place, indeed. Fabulously so.
We go into a couple antique stores. In one, there’s a guy running around in his socks, trying to sort his mother’s things, including her coin collection. So of course I have to buy some things from him. A string of pink glass beads:

A slice of stalactite from a cave in Mexico (shhhhhh—he thinks he was probably not supposed to have that):

A brooch made out of braided human hair:

Some old coins for The EGE to carry in his pocket with his other Old Pocket Coins. No photos, as they’re In His Pocket already.
Back on the road. We drive to Ft. Worth, where we stop, as always, at the Central Market on Hulen. We love this store. We stock up on Pom Wonderful, The EGE’s Drink of Choice, and buy wine and some stuff from the deli and some fabulous Chilean roses (which we enjoy in our room and then leave with the front desk people when we check out)

and I ride the basket through the parking lot back to the truck—which is scary, as the parking lot slopes and the basket picks up speed and, although I don’t actually say it, my brain is going, “Wheeeeeee!” and “Whoa!”
I stand by and watch The EGE load everything into the cooler—I am so not good at packing that I don’t even try to help. I just stand and hand him things.
And a car pulls up behind us. The window goes down, and the woman driving leans over and says, “You don’t know me, but I know you. I read your blog almost every day.”
I squealed.
This is just the coolest thing in the world to me, and it made my whole day. I firmly believe we can find each other out there in the world, if we pay attention and make it easy for people to recognize us. Jane said she had seen us in the check-out line and knew immediately who we were. Who else could we be? This is My Mission. Or one of them: for us to Find Each Other Out There.
So with me all happy, we drove on to our to the La Quinta at the airport, where I was happy to find that the room was one that has two doors—one into the hallway, and one out onto the grassy landscaped area by the pool, with a window on either side = LIGHT. Most rooms are dark and dreary, but this one was great, and we had the door open most of the time, as they’ve done a really nice job on the plantings and it was all green and happy out there.
Saturday morning we went to the bead show and schmoozed with people we see every year here and in Houston at the quilt show. I love these people—lots of bead people are really, really cool. One young girl left her booth and came up to me. Her head was wrapped in a scarf, and she had on layers of funky clothes, with a leather bag around her waist and big, unlaced boots and a diamond in her nose, and she was gorgeous. She said, “You. Are. Stunning.”
I would have hugged her, but if she was from Somewhere Else, like Up North, it might have frightened her a lot. But, again:  we Found Each Other. I wanted to bring her home with me.
After the Bead-Buying Spree, we headed up Main Street in the cool drizzle. Usually this weekend is hot and dry, so we weren’t really prepared and had to scrounge a hoody and a flannel cape out of the back of the Wizard. On the way to the official Main Street Days festival, we stopped in at a new-to-us wine bar, The Tasting Room, which turned out to be really cool. It’s such a great idea:  they have a Wall o’ Wine—a wall with bottles of wine behind glass, with dispensers. You go in, get a credit card, have them put some amount of money on it. We started with $20. You go up and down the wall, checking out the wine, reading the labels. When you find one you want to try, you insert your card, hold your glass under the spigot of the appropriate bottle,and choose the button:  one ounce, two ounces, six ounces. Or maybe it was 2, 4, 6. All I know is that the smallest amount, which ran in price from $1.80 on up, was about two swallows. Six ounces cost from $9 on up, so it was really kind of expensive. But you’re paying for the technology and the novelty, and we were willing to do that. We put another $20 on the card and tasted lots of wines, and then we had some cheese, sitting out on the little patio on a comfy couch and visiting with some odd guy who was a little miffed when he started to light up and I asked him not to, seeing as how we were there, fully ensconced, when he wandered up. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to handle this:  smokers think the outdoors belongs to them, and if you’re outside, tough for you. I believe that if we’re there first and settled in, unless it’s labeled as a Smoking Area, then they shouldn’t come up and sit down and light up. I do understand that they feel they should have a place to sit and smoke while they eat, but I disagree:  I don’t think they have the right to smoke in public, period. He complained, at one point, trying to equate my opposition to his smoking to being offended by odors, that he found the odor of our cheese plate offensive. I said, “Yeah, but our brie isn’t carcinogenic.” He left soon thereafter. Weird bastard, anyway.
We finally made our way down to the ticket booths, where we stood and schmoozed with the woman there, admiring each other’s hair (her hair was very short and very, very blond (she was black; we compared dyes)).
We wandered down to Su Vino, one of our favorite wineries. A couple was there selling their homemade cheesecakes, giving samples to try with the wine. So of course we did that, and of course—as always when we sample stuff—we ended up buying half a dozen little cheesecakes and half a dozen bottles of wine.
Then we went out and stumbled upon a good blues band playing on one of the stages, and we sat and listened to them for half an hour. It was fabulous. I bought a CD.
Back to the room to change clothes because my dear husband, the Light of My Life, Soul of My Soul, wanted to go, god help me, to Gilley’s Dallas.
Oh, I do adore him. Indeed. And I do love dancing with him more than just about anything I can think of. But honeys! In my quest to make him happy by going with him to various honky-tonks across the state of Texas, I have put up with some of the most god-awful horrible country western music you can possibly imagine.
A couple of weekends ago we went to a dance here in Midland at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, where they’d just dedicated the brand-spanking-new Gloria Denham Ballroom. We missed the dedication, but a friend told us about it. Gloria Denham was there, and she told how it had come to be built.
Her accountants came to her and said, “Um, Ms. Denham? You need to spend some money.”
And she goes, “On what?” And they say, “Whatever you want.”
“Well, I’ve always wanted my own ballroom. Do I have enough to build me a ballroom?”
“Yes, indeed. But here’s what you need to do. . .”
She needed to build it and donate it to someone who would pay the taxes (if applicable) and utilities. So who else but the Catholic Church?
It’s a fabulous space, with an excellent dance floor and nice lighting, tables and chairs, a room for a buffet, fabulous restrooms. Just marvelous. And since it’s not on the property of, oh, the First Baptist Church, you can bring beer and wine and whiskey and pretty much anything your little heart desires. Which people do. Boy, howdy.
So we went to a dance there, just recently, and the band. Oh, the band. Now, the playing wasn’t that bad, in a three-guy-country-and-western-band sort of way. It was passable. But the singing! Oy, the singing, the singing. It was quite possibly the worst singing I’ve ever heard, ever, except maybe in the shower, when I’m all alone.
I thought it was the worst Country Western Music Experience of my little life.
Until Gilley’s Dallas. Help me.
I could go into excruciating detail about the horrors of 19-year-old rock guitarists getting a gig on the weekend at a country western bar and faking it, which is easy to do now that they’ve fucked country music unto the lord by doing that whole “cross-over” thing with rock. I could tell you all about that. But I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to rant again today. Instead, I will give you this:
We danced, at Gilley’s Dallas, to a country western version of Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”
Yes. We did.
Well, we tried:  I was laughing so hard The EGE had to hold me up. It was one more instance of experiencing something so mind-numbingly awful you can scarcely believe you’ll live through it and then going, “Oh, wait:  it’ll be a GREAT story for the blog!” I swear that’s the only thing that saved me. If you think I’m exaggerating, go here. Listen. Now imagine it as a two-step played by a really, really bad band made up of boys who were not yet born when the song came out.
Try not to whimper. It will only scare your animals.
(Anyway, so that’s our road trip. Another stop at another Central Market on the way out of town, a wonderful picnic on the way home. And now back to work.)

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